The Promised Land II: Second Sight
by LadyElaine
Summary: Fifteen years after the events of 'Lost and Found,' the characters are reunited on Janus.
1. Primacy

**I.** **Primacy**

The Constitution of the Confederated Human Worlds was drafted at the first Orion Convention, according to the few history books I bothered with in slam. And the second amendment to this illustrious document outlines colonial law. The Right of Primacy, to get right down to it.

The first group of stakeholders to survive for ten consecutive years on an untried world are granted all rights—including charter and government—to that planet, its resources, and its orbital space. Moons and other natural satellites, too. They say "group of stakeholders" because they don't figure just one or two people can manage a stake on an alien world. But they never figured on me.

Richard B. Riddick, a Prime? Never happen.

It's simple to get preliminary confirmation, if far from easy—a decade of killing off photophobic flying teeth could never be considered easy. See, every starship, from two-seaters to luxury passenger liners to cheap rentals, is required to carry a bone sampling kit in its medical supplies. Since skeletal tissue is constantly being broken down and reformed, a human skeleton is never more than ten years old. Spend a decade on any planet, and the mineral content of your bones, from surface to marrow, will match the particular isotopic signature of that planet.

Send in a sample of bone tissue, and if you pass, a bunch of nice young men and women wearing nice dark suits come to confirm that the DNA from the sample is really yours. The handy thing about this part is that a Prospective Prime—prospectors, they're called—can't be brought in under any warrant.

The process is practically foolproof. Never been successfully counterfeited, though a few prospectors have had to go on the run after trying to fake it.

Top it all off—once your Primacy gets confirmed, any criminal record you may have gets completely erased; the proverbial clean slate.

Bibbity-bobbity-boo, you're a new person.

The Orion Congress figures ten years of hard labor and bare survival to be sufficient punishment for any crime—since two years fighting for your life in a penal colony isn't enough.

Ten years of freedom. Ten years building a life of your own with the only woman you ever needed. Ten years of fucking paradise. As long as you don't mind the local wildlife. But it's only been nine years, and I'm still the most wanted man in human space, and now I have to give up my shot at Primacy. Because I can't let her die.

We were nearly done clearing the planet, Jack and me. Only one last hive to go. That monster should have been dead, as many times as it had been shot. Fucking lying there in the triple sunlight, smoldering like all the rest. But Jack stepped too close, and it opened her chest like a chainsaw.

Now all that's standing between Jack and the long dark is a bunch of clumsy stitches, a mummy's worth of bandages, and a cryo tank. If she doesn't make it—then what? Another notch in my belt? Fuck that.

Once I locked Jack in one of the _Nightfall_'s twin cryo tubes, I went back to the bombed-open cavern where she'd been wounded, and I used the last of our precious stash of flash-bang grenades. They threw the surviving monsters, hiding just inside collapsed tunnels and sheltering under overhangs, into a mindless riot; but that was the point. They go nuts, and they fly right out into the light they're hiding from. Crispy critters. That, and they're easier to hit when they're too crazed to figure out what you're aiming at.

It felt like I was avenging Jack's death. They call the economy-sized tubes on the ship coffins. I've programmed the _Nightfall_'s autopilot for Janus. It's the only place I can think of that's safe. And Imam's there.

Now I'm lying in this cheap excuse for a cryo tube, and for the first time I can remember, I wish for the oblivion of cold sleep.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………

_He was looking for something._

_Through chamber after chamber of the empty hive that they'd converted to their home, Riddick hunted frantically, all the while knowing that Something Else, far under the earth, was hunting him in turn. _

_He'd lost something important, but he didn't even know what it was. Not large, that much he knew—small enough to bundle in his arms. The ground rumbled, and cracks began to form under Riddick's feet._

Inside the tiny cryo tube, Riddick's eyes fluttered open sightlessly. His mouth formed a name.

"Jack."


	2. Time Dilation

**II.** ** Time Dilation**

Long ago, people had thought they could travel the stars in one or two lifetimes. They thought they could see the moon, Jupiter, and Alpha Centauri, and be home in time for dinner. But faster-than-light travel does something curious to time. Most people, even those who'd traveled in space before, never thought about relativity, until it slapped them in the face. They would return home to find their families and friends any number of years older than they should have been.

Riddick had learned to take advantage of this. Literally leaving his past behind, he took a perverse pleasure in abetting the universe's dirty tricks. By the time the penal system had given up on him, sentencing him to spend the rest of his life in the hell of Slam, a criminal record spanning well over a century on his home planet had given Riddick the reputation of a god. Reality actors were his long-lost siblings, psychics credited him with terrifying mental powers, and countless tabloid women bore his children.

Many years later, Riddick would use that same dirty trick of time on himself. Those months Riddick had spent planet-hopping had not just been to gather a stash of weapons. It had given a pretty young girl time to grow up into a beautiful woman. Jack had lived five years in the span of a few months of Riddick's life. But now, in a few achingly slow cryogenic heartbeats, she could have already used up the rest of her future.

The first thing Riddick's eyes locked onto, when they opened after a long slice of eternity, were Jack's lifesigns. Breathing was slow, pulse erratic, and blood pressure lower than it should have been—but by God those lifesigns were there.

The floor shifted and groaned under Riddick's feet as the _Nightfall_'s attitude adjusted, settling into orbit over Janus. Pulling his bloodstained clothes back on, Riddick punched in silent running, bypassing Janus' spaceport and its auto-identification system. The _Nightfall_ burned through the upper atmosphere, tearing open the black, moonless sky as it made for the same crater it had once occupied, far out in the wilds of the two-faced world.

Engines thrumming, she settled down into the dust of the courtyard. Riddick barely remembered to shut down the outer lights before he lowered the ramp, leaving Jack still in stasis in her tank. As he exited the ship, he hastily noted small differences—more caverns carved from the face of the crater; people hurrying into and out of many of the caverns, seemingly unafraid of the winged predators they met and passed; even a decorative fountain had been put in.

_All the marks of civilization_, he thought as a sudden frenzy of wings and teeth and unearthly whoops surrounded him. Trying to suppress his chills, he waited, unmoving, till the creatures settled around him. _Even a greeting party_.

"I know you freaks of fucking nature can understand me," he grated. "There is a very sick woman on board my ship. Get help out here. Now."

Other than the hypnotically swaying heads, the creatures didn't move. If he concentrated, he could just hear the subsonic rumble of their soundings. Then one of them rose on its serpentine tail, spread its talons, and grinned. The dry rasp of a footstep sounded behind him, and he turned to face—

"Kat."

Turning her head slightly, Kat addressed the surrounding beasts. "Well? What are you waiting for? Get a medical team here immediately. Tell them to bring a stretcher." All but one of the creatures scattered, disappearing into various burrows. The remaining one was heavily scarred, with ruined wings. With a quiet "This way" chirr, it led the human pair into the hive.

"Where's Imam? I expected him to meet us."

The ex-slave gave a stiff smile. "He'll be overjoyed to see you, I'm sure."

_What the hell does that mean?_ It struck Riddick suddenly that Kat had aged, and not well. Fine, angry lines had begun to etch through the thin fur on her face, and her eyes had lost their amber gleam.

"How long has it been on this end?"

"Fifteen years." Kat's hand brushed the phosphorescent side of the lichen covered corridor, lending her fingertips a faint glow. The creature guiding them paused occasionally to sweep rocks and debris out of the way.

Riddick felt like a dog being led along on a leash. He itched to get back to the _Nightfall_, back to Jack. Irrationally, he thought she might die if he wasn't there, and his mind wouldn't let go of the fear.

_Jack's not going to die_, he growled to himself. _Don't even fucking think it._

They finally reached what must have been an infirmary. The artificially clean smell of the place broadcast its purpose, but as Riddick entered, the sickly-sweet odor of old blood assaulted him. Somehow, someone had gotten to the ship; Jack's pitiful, broken body was already there.

Two men, swathed in bloodied gowns and masks, worked over her, cleaning out the hideous wounds on her chest. Several bags of blood were already hung next to Jack, one hooked via an IV to her arm. Jack's face was pale and unresponsive. Her hair, which he'd finally cajoled her into growing out, was stiff with ichor. The two doctors had taken out Riddick's clumsy stitching and were cleaning more of the alien blood out of the rips in her flesh.

Someone shoved a chair into his legs, and he collapsed into it.

When he tore his eyes away from Jack, he saw an older woman, covered in small bronze scales, behind him. She gave him a tight, but not unsympathetic smile, and turned to another bed. Riddick let his gaze follow her, desperate for anything to look at other than Jack's body. But the woman stood in front of the other bed for several seconds, and what little he could see of the occupant was blocked by Kat's form.

But then the woman stalked out of the infirmary, and Riddick was left wondering how even fifteen years could do so much damage.

"Help me sit up." Imam's voice was just a shadow of what it had once been. "Hello, Mr. Riddick. It is good to see you again." He looked like he wanted to say more, but a fit of coughing seized him. He held a cloth to his mouth till the racking coughs let him go.

When Imam dropped his hand, the rag was spotted with dark patches. "How badly was Jack injured?" he whispered.

Riddick hesitated, swallowing the dull pain in his own throat. He rubbed his hand over the stubble on his head. "She'll be fine in a few days."

A wheezing chuckle. "You have lost your knack for barefaced lies, I think." Another cough, and then: "And has she been happy?"

Riddick gazed back over at Jack's bed, where the white suits were now stitching her neatly up. "She look happy to you right now?"

But when Riddick turned back to Imam, the old man had slumped back on the pillow, eyes closed.

"It's the spores," Kat said. Her gaze wandered aimlessly around the room, seeming to settle into empty space.

"Spores?"

"From the mushroom trees. Most of us only have a mild allergic reaction to them, but Imam developed a lung disease. The spores get into everything. There's no place clean enough on this whole damn planet for him to recover. And he refuses to leave. He says all he wants is to see his boys again."

Kat's eyes spilled over with tears, and her hand groped on Imam's bed for his cloth. _Doesn't she realize it's covered with_—

But Kat wiped her eyes, leaving small streaks of blood on her lids.

Then everything came together for Riddick. The creature leading Kat along, Kat's hand always touching the wall, Kat's empty gaze... She didn't look at Riddick—didn't look at anything—because she couldn't _see_ anymore. She couldn't see Jack lying there with stitches holding her body together. She couldn't even see Imam dying.

The universe liked to play dirty tricks, and time was only one of the things it twisted.


	3. Colony Spirit

**III.** **Colony Spirit**

Riddick never asked me my full name. I never told him. Not that it would have mattered—"Jack" is all the name I ever had. And if Imam ever wondered why I was so eager to help out in the Janus underground railroad—well, he never asked, either. But I doubt he would have known it was so personal.

Mom was deemed "too human"—slanted green eyes, a long, graceful neck, but the rest perfectly normal—and turned out of the Den she'd been bred in. That's right. My mom, a pet. And me, half slave. The other half came from some drunken client who didn't use a condom when he picked my mother up, stoned and half-dead from exposure.

I was ten when she ran me out to start making my own living. It's not like I hadn't been taught the tools of the trade. But that kind of life was never for me. I learned early to dress like a boy, and I tried to stay on the right side of the law—the spirit, if not the letter. Cops were the good guys, hookers and dealers were the bad guys.

Except that the last "cop" I met turned out to be one of the bad guys. And I guess mass murderers fall into a gray area for me.

I wanted to make love to Riddick, that first night back aboard his ship. Wanted to, but he wouldn't. Even after we moved to Eclipse, it wasn't really making love. We just sort of fell in with each other. They call it "colony spirit," the way prospectors, even folks who'd never met before, pair up almost instinctively. But it never was all that spirited for us.

Not until the first hive we wiped out—and then, oh boy, he was all over me. Something about the excitement of the kill, I guess. But I wasn't complaining. I'd waited five years for his undivided attention, after all. Hell, I hadn't even known if he'd come back.

I'm not saying he's a good person—he's not, not in any sense of the word. Sure, he thinks he's changed since the crash and all the shit that went down on Eclipse the first time around. But he hasn't, not really. Still dark. Still dangerous, bloodthirsty, and brutal. I know—I've seen him in action.

He's like one of those creatures. Humans came and stole a nest from Janus—it's the fault of the humans those monsters were the way they were. And it's the system that made Riddick what he is now. All those years in the hell of the three suns; all those years in Slam.

From ghoulies and ghosties and multiple murderers, dear Lord preserve us.

I don't know why he came back for me—either time. Guilty conscience? No. If the man had a conscience, it would have spoken out long ago. All I know is, he came back for me, not once, but twice. And then he never left. I still don't know why.

I was the one who left.

I'd been careless and stupid; it was my own damn fault. Nine years of killing off nightmares without a single major injury to either of us? Blind, stupid luck. One more year to go, one last nest to kill off. And then we'd be free. The planet would be _ours_.

Guess that's what had decided me, the right of Primacy. I never wanted to go back to that planet, but the thought of it being ours, mine and Riddick's... Well, mainly, the thought of Riddick being free. Freedom. That's what did it. What got me. Some things should never be caged.

Nine years down. One more to go. Almost through the worst of it. And I had to go in alone, stepping too close to one of the things, not realizing it wasn't dead yet.

I never had any problem killing those monsters. I enjoyed it as much as Riddick did. Even back in the caves on Janus, I never felt entirely safe with them. "Them." Like creatures from a horror film.

Imam thought my nightmares went away after a while, but they never did. I had nightmares every damn night I lived on Janus—nightmares of those _things_ that had killed almost everyone else from the crash. And when I woke up, there they'd be, all around me. I never told him about it; I think maybe he still had nightmares, too.

So when Riddick and I got back to the planet—we named it Eclipse, ha ha—I had no problem killing off those damn flying teeth.

We had a few close calls at first. Like, we learned real quick not to start digging till _after_ we'd set and blown the charges. Foot-long claws coming up through the sand is not my idea of a good day.

What you have to do is cave in the ground above the nests, chimneys and all, with explosives. Watch the critters that don't get out of the way quick enough have really cool allergic reactions to the sunlight. Then, when all the screaming has died down, you toss in a few flash-bang grenades. Talk about a double-whammy! The sound disorients them, the light hurts them.

Then you've got remote light globes. And energy rifles. And hollow point rounds. And then there's the phosphorous-tipped rounds. Those are my favorite—the beasts burn alive from the inside out.

But sometimes they turn blind and stupid after the first assault. Sometimes they just throw themselves shrieking right out into the triple sunlight. I don't know why it bothers me when they do that.

Just _think_ about it, though! Two measly little humans—okay, one little human and one big, muscly human, but still! Two humans took out a whole planet full of monsters. It was so easy. With no eclipse to protect them, hive by hive fell to us. We felt like hot-damn conquering heroes.

Right up until I fucked up.

See, we were going to take a long vacation after we got our Primacy. I wanted to go to Heinlein City on Mars, visit Disneyland there. Riddick wanted to go skinny dipping in the Marineris Trench. Well, ocean nowadays, but everyone still calls it a trench. We decided that, what the hell, we'd do both. Pretty soon, neither one of us would have to hide any more.

So while we're happily blowing the hell out of the very last nest on the planet, guess what Jack's thinking about? Not Disneyland, I'll tell you that much. I should have kept my mind on my job. Instead, I carelessly stepped over—_over_, mind you, not around like I should have—some critter's tail.

It was still sizzling. You never go close to one that's still burning—if the skin's bubbling and blistering, the thing's still alive.

I hardly even felt the pain. I didn't even realize I'd fallen over until I looked up and saw Riddick leaning over me. He was yelling something, but I couldn't hear him. What was weird was that I knew I'd been thinking about something important just before. Something I had to tell Riddick, but hadn't yet. I'd been so worried about losing him, but now...

What if I never got to tell him how much I loved him? What if I died, and he never knew?

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Riddick stumbled out of the maze of caverns and back under the open sky. Heavy rainclouds hung low in the sky, but he wouldn't have been able to see the stars anyway. The price for seeing in the dark—invisible stars.

They told him Jack's chances looked slim. They told him the next twenty-four hours would mean the difference between life and death—if she could last that long. They told him there was nothing for him to do but wait.

He picked up a rock and threw it across the courtyard. It clattered down on the other side, colliding with a large boulder.

The boulder uncurled itself, showing wicked teeth, and hissed at him.

"Son of a bitch." Riddick bent down and picked up another rock. "You know, you look just like the fucker that hurt Jack." He threw the rock, and the creature gave another rattling hiss, mantling its wings. "Then again, all you eyeless bastards look the same to me."

The beast chittered at Riddick, snapping its dagger-like teeth, its head swaying as it stalked toward him. They circled each other for a long moment, then the creature rose up on its tail, grinned again, and showed its long shooting spines.

That was all the warning it gave before it flew at him. Riddick threw himself on his back, kicking out as the thing landed on him. It somersaulted through the air, wings flailing, and landed with a crunch behind him. Riddick was back on his feet in an instant, but the monster had backed several paces away. One wing hung at a painful angle.

The creature snapped at Riddick. Then it bent its head down, scanning the ground, and plucked up a massive rock in one clawed hand.

"Go ahead, try it. How's a blind freak like you gonna see to throw anyway?"

A stuttered shriek, and Riddick suddenly realized he was exchanging insults with something that was completely aware of what he'd just said. He barely had time to move before he felt a pop in his shoulder as the stone hit with surprising accuracy.

With a roar of mixed pain and rage, Riddick hurled himself at the brute as if to tackle it—but stopped just short of the wicked teeth.

The massive head swayed to the right. Riddick moved with it. A locating shriek set his eardrums ringing. The head swung the other way, and Riddick rolled along with it again. Another rattling shriek and, with a puzzled huff of rotted breath, it turned to look behind itself.

Riddick sprang onto the creature's back, curled his arms around the sensory horns, and locked his hands together behind the mammoth head. It thrashed and bucked, but his grip only tightened. It threw its head back, and the crest slammed into Riddick's chest, but he just grunted. Hot pain lanced through his shoulder, and a spine grazed his leg, but he knew if he let go he'd be finished.

A crack. A tear. The long bone of one sensory horn tore loose with a wet snap, and Riddick dropped from the beast's back and rolled away.

The thing staggered in confused circles, a few membranes still dangling at the side of its head. Mewling and shrieking, it lashed out drunkenly at nothing.

Riddick watched for a while, until it finally collapsed to the ground, one wing still flapping uselessly. Then he stalked over to it and stabbed it through the chest with its own stolen shaft.

He rubbed his bruised shoulder and stretched it tenderly. "Fucker. You still all look the same to me."


	4. Turned to Stone

**IV. Turned to Stone**

Two events had changed Kat's life over the years. The first had happened while the initial blush of freedom was still on her, and the monstrous Janites still held a fearful fascination.

Their language was not difficult to pick up. It was more like birdsong than words—the music of raw instinct and life, more than the dry rhythm of logical information. Soon she found herself carried along for hours at a time when choruses of beasts would sing their long epics. These legends held her in their grip even in her dreams.

She'd always considered herself a reasonable person, not given to flights of fancy or belief in fairy tales. But the stories! How the Elders, those venerable beasts who had lived long enough to gain a sense of self separate from the hive mind, would sometimes set their minds loose to wander outside their bodies. How some wandered so far they never found their way back and eventually became entombed in stone; how, if you investigated some of the cavern rocks closely enough, you would find imprints of their bones, and know their spirits still wandered loose. And how the very oldest of them, the very first Elder—whose remains, it was said, could still be found by the impious or curious—would someday return from its far travels to bring a great gift to all the Hives.

And so Kat went out looking, hunting for the fossils that had given birth to these legends, captivated by the unwritten history the songs might hold.

Not so long after she started these long rambles, the Janites began joking that she was an Elder in training, wandering bodily now in practice for the centuries-long forays her mind (they naively thought) would embark on in the far-distant future. She told them again and again that most humans were lucky if they saw more than one century, but they never did believe her.

One day she came to a long-unused tunnel. A pile of stones had been placed at its mouth, a small cairn in the pattern that meant a cave-in had happened inside. But none had that she could tell. Curiosity prickling, she stepped carefully over the stones and entered.

At the very far end, there had indeed been a cave-in. Some of the massive boulders even bore the evidence of fossilized bones—Elders, Kat thought with a smile, who had wandered too far. For a long moment, she let herself imagine their ancient spirits, clustered around her as she explored.

The digging had apparently recommenced, swinging the corridor abruptly to the right. Feeling as though the legends were coming to life around her, Kat crept through the tunnel extension into a huge cavern.

Her gasp echoed like a gunshot.

There it was, impossibly huge, mummified by unimaginable eons. It had to have been ancient—she even thought she saw the shadows of long-atrophied eyes, perhaps the last evolutionary step before full blindness. The smell of dust made her sneeze, and as the rasping echoed through the chamber she almost thought she saw the great beast move.

Impossible, of course. It was too long dead to come back, wasn't it? But it looked so… perfect. As if it might come back to life at any moment, perhaps bearing its untold treasure. Or as if a spark might return to those tiny eyes, as if it would turn to gaze full on this puny creature intruding its eternal rest.

Kat turned and ran. And from that day forward, she _believed_.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The second event happened perhaps a week later.

There were three exits from Moshe Ibrahim's office. One led back into the human level, where Kat had come from, full of light and noise and the hustle and bustle of people. One led through a winding corridor out into the landing crater where occasional ships came and went. And one led deep into the earth, where the only light was the pale phosphorescence of the walls, shadowed by the shrieking, chirring masters of the hive.

A year before, almost to the day, Kat had found herself in this same stone office, at this same stone desk, meeting a man who was all too much flesh and blood. On that day, he had taken her collar off. Today, he was offering her a new one.

Strong, he called her. Pure. And beautiful—as if the feline spots bred into her and the feline grace trained into her were any substitute for real beauty. And then he showed his true colors.

Marriage. He wanted to have children with her. Children, that was the thing. Lots of children. He was a doctor, he could make sure she never fell ill from childbearing, never suffered a single birth pain, as long as she would submit to carrying his seed.

Moshe Ibrahim, the medical genius who had created the slave races—for colonization, he claimed, never for slavery—the man who had used his own genetic code in that creation, wanted to continue his grand experiment. Oh, he made it sound so noble, this man the slaves called "Moses." They could find a new planet, build a new civilization. Just imagine, a race of slaves earning the right to Primacy!

His race. His planet. His people. He never said a word about what those former slaves might want for themselves. About what _she_ might want.

Kat didn't leave the way she had come in. She thought that she had stumbled into the left-hand entrance, the one that would lead her deep into the hive, where she might be safe among the knifelike teeth and eerie song. Instead, she found herself running headlong out into the huge crater. And when she reached the lip of the crater, she kept running.

A long time later, when the tears finally cleared from her eyes, Kat realized she had no idea where she was. Her legs brushed through long, reedy fungus, every step producing a small explosion of spores. Helpless in a sudden coughing fit, she fell into a nest of fire.

On a planet where the dominant species was allergic to light, what seemed the most helpless prey was far from it. Tiny furless mammals huddled in fragile nests—but they had a defense that made them the terror of predators: light.

Fluorescing veins in the rodents' skin seared open. White burned through Kat's eyelids, through the pinpricks of her pupils, ate away the retinal lining like acid.

She never was sure who had found her, or how. Only that the jokes had been right, in a way—after all that practice to be an Elder, she had wandered too far and had turned to stone.


End file.
